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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23413942">a tiny blip in all of space and time</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebookthiefstardis/pseuds/thebookthiefstardis'>thebookthiefstardis</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who (2005)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Episode: s03e10 Blink, Gen, What does not happen in this episode</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 05:22:53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,400</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23413942</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebookthiefstardis/pseuds/thebookthiefstardis</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor and Martha get stuck in 1969.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Prologue</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Martha ran to the end of the road and turned impatiently. Honestly! It was just like the Doctor to stop by for a chat while the planet was about to be destroyed. She craned her neck to see whether there was any sign of the lizard-creature they were tracking when she was startled by a voice from behind.</p>
<p>"Red Hatching! That's the word I was looking for. Martha Jones, you are absolutely brilliant. Fantabulous. No, never saying that again." The Doctor made a face like he'd tasted something bitter. "What are we waiting for? Allons-y!"</p>
<p>But she stood her ground. "Doctor, who was she?"</p>
<p>"I don't know." He was glib as usual, but she knew from experience that meant he was hiding something. Something unpleasant.</p>
<p>"What did she mean, 'You'll get stuck in 1969?' How can you get stuck anywhere? You've got the TARDIS."</p>
<p>"I'll explain later. Come on, we've got things to take care of! Well, four things and a lizard."</p>
<p>"You always say that but you never - Hang on, how is that thing fitting in there?" A plastic manila folder the size of her forearm just disappeared in his coat pocket.</p>
<p>"They're bigger on the inside."</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. "Nothing here. Well, nothing dangerous. Well, not that dangerous. Know what, I’ll just have a quick scan."</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The TARDIS came to a thrumming halt.</p><p>"Wester Drumlins!" The Doctor joined Martha at the door of the TARDIS as she cautiously tried to judge where in Time and Space they were. "Looks like your everyday crumbly old mansion, but I've detected a Stable Time Loop around here so we'd best poke about to see what's causing it."</p><p>"What's a Stable Time Loop?" Martha asked as she waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark. The Doctor, as usual, had bounded off ahead of her.</p><p>"A fixed point in time. We can't interfere in one of these." He replied from somewhere ahead of her. "Be careful, now - there's a flight of stairs over here. Don't trip."</p><p>"Hang on a second." She had finally caught up with him; he was too busy sonicing a chandelier lying on the floor wrapped in plastic to notice. "If it's not possible to meddle in one of these, what are we doing here? Isn't this meddling?"</p><p>"Not this time. We're part of these events. The TARDIS must've sensed that too - brought us here with no fuss at all. First time her and me have agreed upon something." He smiled at her in the lopsided way that made her stomach lurch, but before she could respond he'd straightened up and the moment was lost. "Nothing out of the ordinary, here. Let's go check the gardens."</p><hr/><p>"Something is not quite right." The Doctor mused as they roamed around what seemed like a perfectly normal overgrown garden to Martha, pointing his sonic screwdriver anywhere and everywhere as it made that funny whistling noise. "This is a perfectly ordinary-"</p><p>He had disappeared around a corner of the house. Martha was about to follow him when he abruptly stopped talking and muttered something under his breath that she couldn't make out.</p><p>"What is it, what's wrong?" She felt an unfamiliar dread creep over her as she ran towards him.</p><p>"No! Stay where you are, don't move." He sounded unusually grave, and a little bit scared, which meant things were about to get a lot worse. "Look around you - carefully. Can you see any stone statues?"</p><p>Martha looked around. There, in the far corner of the shrubbery, she could just about make out a shape. It looked like an angel from here, complete with wings.</p><p>"Yeah. There's one at the other end of the garden. Looks like an angel or something." She looked around for more, but when she looked again at the first one it seemed as though it was closer to her. Must be an illusion, she thought, but best to check with the Doctor. "Can't see any others. The first one, though - it looks like it's moved."</p><p>"Don't take your eyes off it." He sounded further away now. "I'm trying to go around the house and come where you are from the other side." His voice was getting fainter and fainter. "You stay where you are and whatever you do, don't -"</p><p>His voice abruptly cut off.</p><p>"Doctor?" Martha shouted, her heart hammering loudly in her chest. He didn't reply.</p><p>He's just going around the house, silly, she told herself. He's too far away for you to hear him, that's all. Though she could not shake off the uneasiness that was growing with every second he failed to appear. His plans weren't the most foolproof, like the first time they'd met, when he'd almost died trying to bring an intergalactic criminal to justice. What if he needed her help right now?</p><p>Keeping the statue within her sight, she tried to slowly edge backwards, towards the place the doctor had abruptly vanished from. Suddenly, she felt her feet fly out from beneath her - she must have tripped on some rock or something - and she saw the TARDIS key which the Doctor had given her inexplicably fly out. She was about to go after it to retrieve it when she felt a sudden jolt and - </p><p>- she landed into a dark lane, her back against a brick wall.</p><hr/><p>"Blink." </p><p>The Doctor looked around at his surroundings, which were suddenly more unfamiliar than before, and let out a groan. He could feel the wrongness in his bones, the strange feeling of being displaced in time without his TARDIS, but right now he had bigger problems than that. There were - by the looks of it - at least two Weeping Angels loose in Wester Drumlins, and Martha was right in the thick of it. He couldn't go back for her, because he didn't have his TARDIS, and he was stuck in the past, somewhere in the - he gave an experimental sniff - late 1960s, early '70s, maybe? He licked the wall behind him, just to make sure. Yep. London, 1969. Not a bad time to be in, but this meant that he'd have to live on Earth for some 40 - odd years before he could go back and save Martha.</p><p>Hang on a minute, though. Stuck in 1969. That rang a bell, somewhere. He vaguely remembered a blond girl - what was her name, again? Dolly Drake? Polly Pigeon? She'd handed him a folder - it should be somewhere in here - </p><p>He frantically started turning out his pockets, but this was easier said than done. When you'd lived as long as the Doctor had, and when you had pockets that were bigger on the inside, things tended to accumulate in them. After removing his spare screwdriver, a ball of string, a pair of Zeus plugs that he'd turned into castanets, a yo-yo, a whole handful of change from so many different planets he'd visited, and a bag of kola nuts, he finally found what he was looking for - a purple plastic folder with a bunch of papers and a few photographs. He chewed on a Kola nut as he began to leaf through the papers.</p><p>Three minutes later, he had a plan. Or rather, a plan had been handed to him in a plastic folder. Now he just had to figure out the details. He had to arrange all the clues for Sally (Sally Sparrow, that was her name) to find, easier said than done at this point. But first things first, he had to find Martha - assuming that she would encounter the same Angel that he had, and she'd get sent to 1969 as well.</p><p>"Allons-y!" The Doctor said to nobody in particular, and set off in no particular direction, his sonic screwdriver bleeping.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. "No really, it is. It’s a screwdriver and it’s sonic. Look."</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Martha took a long, shuddering breath to steady herself, and then went ahead and took two more.</p><p>Her head was swimming, as though she'd just travelled a very large distance at a very high speed, and she felt faintly nauseous. She sat down with her head between her knees, trying to breath evenly and let her surroundings come into focus. The dilapidated mansion and its spooky grounds had vanished, and she seemed to be in the middle of the city in a shady lane jammed between two tall brick walls. She didn't remember seeing this place before in her entire life, and she had no idea how far she was from Wester Drumlins, nor how she had ended up here.</p><p>But she could not give up; she had to figure out where exactly she was, and then maybe she could get a taxi to Wester Drumlins, or perhaps ask her mother for help - but she stopped that thought in its tracks, because her mother would most likely ask her to come home straightaway, and leave the Doctor to his fate.</p><p>She got up to her feet, a little wobbly, and started off towards the end of the lane.</p>
<hr/><p>After about fifteen minutes of walking around, she had not made much progress in figuring out where she was. Something about her surroundings was throwing her off, making her uneasy. This was London, that much she was sure of - but for the life of her she could not figure out which part of London she was in, and after a few minutes of walking she wasn't even sure where she had originally ended up. </p><p>All right, so this plan of walking around and hoping that she'd chance upon something familiar was clearly not working. She stopped at a street corner, and took a few deep breaths, trying to get rid of the last vestiges of her nausea and take the opportunity to observe her surroundings more carefully. It seemed like she was in one of the hundreds of nondescript neighbourhoods that dotted London. Same old brick houses lining the streets, punctuated by a few shops, most of which seemed to be unoccupied, but she could see a small crowd forming at one of the shops at the end of the street.</p><p>Before she could decide whether or not it was worth investigating, she was distracted by a woman who was walking past, complaining loudly as she passed Martha about "some weird bent shining a blue noisy light on decent people, these kids nowadays I tell you -" and she knew immediately that it could only have been the Doctor. She walked quickly towards the shop, relieved to find the Doctor so quickly, but as she drew near she realised that the little crowd wasn't very taken with the sonic screwdriver being pointed at them, and one of them was trying to tug it out of the Doctor's hands. The Doctor was obviously not too pleased with this turn of events, and was trying to explain, gesticulating loudly, but the crowd was in no mood to listen.</p><p>What could she do now? She realised that storming to the crowd would probably not be much good, she'd be hopelessly outnumbered like the Doctor. What she needed was a distraction.</p><p>She cupped her hands round her mouth, and shouted as loudly as was possible for a human to shout, "FIRE!"</p><p>The shout did the trick. The little crowd looked around for the fire, and possibly for where the shout had come from. The Doctor turned around as well, and looked right at her. She gestured at him to run, and he didn't need telling twice. They both made a beeline for the nearest side-alley at top speed, even outrunning the crowd due to all the running practise they'd been getting. Even so, the Doctor easily caught up with Martha, thumping her on the back as he passed her.</p><p>"Brilliant work back there, Martha!" He beamed at her, and she fought down the answering flutter in her stomach that his grin always brought about. "I was just trying to track you with the sonic, but I don't think it's a good timey-wimey detector, I'll have to build one specially."</p><p>"Never mind all that." Now that she'd found the Doctor, her mind was back to the original problem at hand. "Where are we, and what were those weird statues?"</p><p>"Ah." He seemed to deflate a little. "Well, we are in London, in 1969 - not sure of the month - probably March or maybe June?"</p><p>"But - we can't - we never got inside the TARDIS." Martha replied, her heart sinking as she realised she was not even born yet. Heck, her parents hadn't even met yet.</p><p>"The Weeping Angels - the statues we saw back there - they sent us back in time. They're the most efficient predators in the universe, because they're quantum-locked - so nobody can see them move, and they feed off the time energy -"</p><p>"Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second." Martha couldn't quite grasp what he'd said. Quantum-locked? Time energy? All that she could focus on at this moment was that they were forty years away, and that she hadn't been born yet. "Hold off the explanations for a second." She stopped, noticing that they'd somehow ended up back in the original alley where she'd first landed. "How do we get back now? I assume the TARDIS is still in 2007?"</p><p>"Yes." He replied. "But I have a plan. Or rather, a plan has been given to me." He removed a plastic Manila folder from his coat pocket, along with a bag full of some things that vaguely resembled walnuts, but was pink in colour. </p><p>"Er. Ah. Would you like a kola nut?" He offered when he noticed Martha looking suspiciously at the bag.</p><p>"No thanks, I'll pass." She thought the folder looked familiar. "Have I seen this before?"</p><p>"You remember that time - with the red lizard - the girl who told us we'll be stuck in 1969 someday -"</p><p>"Oh my God." Martha suddenly remembered. "You said you'd explain later, but you never did."</p><p>"Well, this is later." He said, a trifle impatiently. "Though actually, it's earlier, because we haven't yet been given the folder yet in the normal flow of time, but for us it's later-" he broke off as Martha shot a glare at him. "The important point is, we're stuck in 1969 because we're part of a Stable Time Loop now. We're here because we always were going to be."</p><p>"And... how do we get back? I'm not particularly keen on living out my life in the '70s and in the '80s, I want to go back and become a proper doctor."</p><p>"Well. That's the plan." He patted the folder. "But. Martha, I'm so sorry. It's going to take a while."</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Me: has never been to London, was born long after the '60s<br/>also me: writes a fic based in London in 1960</p><p>Apologies for any inaccuracies!</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I re-watched 'Blink' recently and it felt like there was a whole other story waiting to be told, hiding under the skin of this episode. This is my take on it.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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